Blood. Invention. Language. Resistance. World. Five ordinary words that do a great deal of conceptual work in everyday life and literature. In this original experiment in critical semantics, Roland Greene considers how these words changed over the course of the sixteenth century and what their changes indicate about broader forces in science, politics, and other disciplines.

Rather than analyzing works, careers, or histories, Greene discusses a broad swath of Renaissance and transatlantic literature—including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Camões, and Milton—in terms of the development of these five words. Aiming to shift the conversation around Renaissance literature from current approaches to riskier enterprises, Greene also proposes new methods that take advantage of digital resources like full-text databases, but still depend on the interpreter to fashion ideas out of ordinary language. Five Words is an innovative and accessible book that points the field of literary studies in an exciting new direction.

Quantification is an intrinsically complex mechanism of expression in natural language, comprising a variety of structural shapes and semantic domains whose inventory has not been completely charted to date. Several linguistic forms associated with quantification in Spanish are explored in Interfaces and Domains of Quantification by Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach, from indefiniteness and ellipsis to the quantificational properties of relative clauses and adverbial particles.
 
Interfaces and Domains of Quantification advocates an interface approach to the grammar of Spanish quantification. Only a precise characterization of the syntactic properties of quantificational constructions and of their associated meanings allows us to understand how more general syntactic and semantic constraints are at work. Among other findings, the interaction of scope and parallelism with ellipsis is reconsidered; the structural significance of modal anchoring and essential properties for the interpretation of indefiniteness is explored in detail; additionally, quantificational variability and correlativity phenomena in relative clauses are analyzed; degree expression is characterized for concessive conditionals and superlatives; and, finally, several discourse particles with a quantificational core are shown to be critical for the articulation of semantic and discourse-pragmatic relations. Taking a detailed look at the different forms, patterns and structures associated with several quantificational domains seems to be the only fully explanatory way to advance our knowledge of the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of quantificational structures.

In Theory and Evidence in Semantics, editors Erhard W. Hinrichs and John Nerbonne present a series of state-of-the-art papers that investigate the interface of natural language semantics with other modules of grammar—such as morphology, syntax, and pragmatics—and pursue applications of semantic theory in computational linguistics. Written by some of the leading scholars in the field, and strongly influenced by the seminal work of David R. Dowty in model-theoretical semantics, the papers provide novel accounts of highly complex sets of semantic phenomena, including anaphora, coordination, ellipsis, interrogatives, and negative and collective predicates, as well as tense and aspect.